The Trust Project announced Tuesday that 20 more news organizations are now on board with its efforts to increase transparency and trust in news media, meaning that more than 120 news sites around the world are now displaying Trust Indicators, and over 200 in total are committed to completing the process of doing so in both their markup language or user-experience designs.

Trust Indicators now reach 217 million people each month.

Mic publisher Cory Haik said her company had already been working on a trust initiative of its own—conducting focus groups with users to get feedback on features that it was considering to help with transparency and trust—before teaming up with The Trust Project, adding, “What we thought would be helpful to users wasn’t necessarily that helpful to users.”

Haik said The Trust Project ended up using a lot of the research Mic had already done and several protocols from its early work.

In addition to the launch partners mentioned above, Trust Indicators have been available since last year on sites owned by the BBC, FourFourTwo (U.K.), Hearst Television, Stuff (U.K.) and Reach (U.K.).

Facebook communications manager for news product Mari Melguizo said the social network could not share specific numbers about the use of Trust Indicators, but “in general, we’ve found that people do find additional context about the articles they see on Facebook to be a valuable tool when determining the credibility of an article. We think there’s a lot more we can do in terms of experiments in this space going forward, especially now that we’ve launched a new way for all interested news pages to provide us with optional information about their brands and best practices.”

Haik said that since adding Trust Indicators, Mic has received several emails thanking it for the additional context, and it has seen less feedback containing questions about its fact-checking policies and standards issues.

She added that links to reporters’ previous stories, additional related stories and footnoting “are not creative massive traffic, but people do click on them.”

Reach said that it found in a survey that after adding Trust Indicators to its flagship news outlet, The Mirror, trust in that publication rose 8 percent.

And the University of Texas-Austin’s Center for Media Engagement conducted an experiment that found that when Trust Indicators were present, it led to higher evaluations of the reputations of news organizations, including for trustworthiness and reliability.

And companies that are in the process of adapting them include Canadian Press, Frontline, El Mundo (Spain), Star Tribune and Zeit Online (Germany).

The Trust Project added that the Institute for Nonprofit News’ INN Labs built and maintains a WordPress VIP-accepted plugin to help participants add the Trust Indicators to their sites.

When Facebook began the process of indexing news pages last month, it worked with The Trust Project to enable publishers to add information such as links to fact-checking, ethics and correction policies to their pages.

Facebook product manager Mollie Vandor said, “The research that went into the Trust Indicators gave us a solid starting point for this work. We plan to continue working with The Trust Project to explore different ways of displaying this information so that people can have a better understanding of the news they see on Facebook.”